The lonely life of conservative comics

“So it sure seems like celebrities latched on to President Barack Obama during the campaign. You had Chris Rock, Oprah, even Stevie Wonder.

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“Stevie Wonder? Why does he care? If anybody should be colorblind ...”

If you’re laughing, then comic Julia Gorin will be performing here all week, folks. The New York-based stand-up says that line went over pretty well when she launched it recently at a comedy club in Pasadena, Calif.

If you’re frowning, perhaps a bit taken aback, then you represent the conservative comic’s conundrum.

In a world where the TV networks, nighttime comics and major comedy clubs are dominated by liberal humor, right-­leaning funnymen continue to struggle. Even with Democrats taking over Washington, they’re pessimistic about things. While the jokes will come easily, they say the laughs will be muzzled. Plus, they moan, conservatives tend not to lend much support to the comedic arts.

The Stevie Wonder line is pretty tame stuff. Gorin’s got some more incendiary — and, she thinks, funny — material in the bank: jokes about the Muslim rumors and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. She’s keeping that material off the stage for now, holding until the time is right. But will that time ever come?

“We have the same phenomenon during his administration that we did during his candidacy,” she says, “that it didn’t matter what came out about him. People were in sort of a hypnotic trance. If that continues to happen during his administration, then I am in trouble and I’ll be hedging [my material] for a general audience or saving it for conservative crowds.”

And that leads to the lonely life of a conservative comic.

By and large, conservative comedians aren’t the most strident members of the Republican Party. Some pass as conservative only by mere comparison to their neighbors in Manhattan and West Hollywood. But they’re already sick of Obama — damn sick of him. They don’t buy the claim that Obama’s coolness, smoothness and skin color have all rendered him beyond lampoonery.

“You heard Chris Rock saying that there’s nothing to make fun about Obama,” says New York stand-up comedian Nick DiPaolo, “and I was like, ‘Do you wanna make a bet?’”

DiPaolo, a familiar face on Comedy Central, doesn’t think it really matters one way or the other, though.

“The mainstream media leans left, and the people that run Comedy Central are a lot of Ivy Leaguers who sort of lean left,” he says.

DiPaolo is particularly infuriated when he considers how George W. Bush’s presidency propelled the careers of liberal funnymen such as Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher — each of whom has a TV show now.

“People say the left is funnier than the right,” says Brad Stine, a conservative Christian stand-up. “Well, the right isn’t given the same options.”

“Conservative humor has never been dead and has never lost its voice,” says Boston College English professor Paul Lewis, author of “Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict.” “Just don’t look for it in the comedy club.”

Former “Saturday Night Live” star Dennis Miller, the most prominent “conservative” comedian on air these days, established his funny bona fides long before he came out as a Bush voter after the Sept. 11 attacks. And as his shtick has gotten more political in the intervening years, Miller has come to adopt a pundit’s mien. He currently hosts a talk-radio show and makes regular guest appearances on Fox News.

“He didn’t get to that level by doing conservative comedy,” Gorin says. “His story is inverted.”